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PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 



PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 



BY 

JAMES M. TAYLOR, D.D., LL.D. 

PRESIDENT OF VASSAR COLLEGE 



» t "J s 



NEW YORK 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

PUBLISHERS 






THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

JUL. 11 1901 

Copyright entry 
OT.ASS Qs XXa N». 

copy a. 



COPTEIGHT, 1901, 

By T. T. CROWELL & CO. 



PEACTICAL OE IDEAL? 

~T~T was a young mining engineer and student 
^- of science, as well as of philosophy, who 
asked, a century ago, " Which is the more prac- 
tical, philosophy or economy ? " " Philosophy," 
he said, " can bake no bread, but she can procure 
for us God, freedom, immortality. Which, then, 
is the more practical ? " This question of the 
German Novalis points a moral for our time, and 
bids our pragmatic generation ask the nature of 
the practical, of which we talk so much. We 
are hearing continually talk of practical men, 
practical politics, practical education, and these 
are supposed to contrast favorably with men 
who see visions, with education which ends in 
books and thought, with politics which empha- 
size purity and the service of the whole people. 
" Baking bread " is something practical, getting 
votes is something tangible, the education which 
enables one to run an engine or teach a school 
is worth while, — but God, freedom, immor- 

5 



6 PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 

tality, these are for those whose heads are in 
the clouds, for the few who may dream, and not 
for the masses of men who must work. 

There may come an occasional doubt, indeed, 
to the most practical man, as to the sufficiency 
of this view of life, and education, and politics. 
When a close student of biology shuts himself 
for months in the humble little laboratory that 
they show you in Paris, and comes out with a 
discovery that saves for France more than all 
her huge debt of war has cost her, men glorify 
the name of Pasteur and forget the long years 
of " impractical " education, and the infatuation 
of the student's ideal which led up to the great 
discovery. When the scientist sits pondering 
his problems and working out the abstrusest 
calculations in mathematics, he is a dreamer, but 
when his dream is realized in the harnessing of 
electricity, and men reckon by amperes, in terms 
of his own name, dreams are seen to be practical 
and vision is found to have substance, and the 
highest problems of abstruse science are seen to 
have as close relation to real life as the very 
bread we eat. " Practical men " may well ask, 
then, whether bread, necessary though it is, is 
any more than the sustenance of life, and whether 
life itself, for every man and in every pursuit, 



PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 7 

is not more than meat, and does not rather con- 
sist in God, freedom, immortality. 

But can we really divorce the practical and 
ideal ? Can we have an education, for example, 
that is solely " practical " and have it touch the 
highest issues of life ? Let us admit that it 
must be practical, that the education which does 
not train men to be more efficient lacks and is 
mistaken, that the world has a right to look for 
better results from the young of this generation, 
with their unequalled opportunities, than it 
could demand from the fathers, that education 
is a failure unless it knits together into order 
and willing response to the mind all the ener- 
gies of body and soul, and that general abilities 
being equal the educated man ought to be a 
better instrument than any other in factory, 
counting-room, or profession, more master of 
himself and of his world. Let us by all means 
emphasize the practical, — but let us know what 
it means. We refuse to recognize as the only 
practical education that which enables a boy to 
run a donkey-engine, and to exclude the quiet 
study and reflection which may result in the 
solution of the problems of a Rontgen and a 
Helmholz, or to say that the hard-headed, suc- 
cessful business man is practical and to call that 



8 PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 

impractical which holds men to faith in the 
larger and deeper life. However practical we 
may deem it, that life loses itself which fails to 
keep in touch with the invisible, — with the 
deeper principles which make business more 
than barter, and science more than hammering 
rocks and a skilled use of the scalpel, and life 
more than the baking and eating of bread. 
Surely that is not success which loses that 
which most sweetens and broadens and elevates 
our lives. No education, then, is practical which 
does not train us to be better, more forceful, 
more useful, but also, no education is practical 
which does not give an outlook beyond the ac- 
tual and tangible and visible, and which fails to 
inspire the soul with a vision in seeking which 
it shall be ever impelled toward " a higher than 
its highest and a better than its best." It is a 
failure if it help us only to bake bread, and does 
not open eyes and heart to unseen things which 
are eternal. The " practical," indeed, destroys 
itself and its own special ends, unless it discov- 
ers at the heart of its activities more than can 
be touched or seen or measured. 

It is the purpose of this little essay to bring 
out the truth in that statement, and by illustra- 
tion to show fully that there is really no practi- 



PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 9 

cal which is not also ideal, — and that nothing 
ministers to life in any proper sense unless it 
touches something deeper than what we gener- 
ally mean by the actual and useful. 

Take, for example, any fine musical composi- 
tion, — say the Ninth Symphony. Can we dis- 
cover its secret by an analysis of its parts, by 
reducing it to its several notes, by pursuing the 
waves of sound to the ear, and then through its 
intricate mechanism along the nerves to the 
brain centres? What have we gained? Facts, 
facts, facts. But of what value are facts ? Of 
none whatever, unless we learn something from 
them, unless they are significant, and not 
merely facts. Now in this case we may have 
gained some knowledge of the philosophy of 
sound, of its external and physiological condi- 
tions, but what have we done for the Ninth 
Symphony? Destroyed it, for us. The ideal 
element is its soul, and we have missed it, and 
.for lack of the transcendent, which is vision, 
the glory of the music is lost to us. 

So it is with a picture. We need not illus- 
trate by a great creation, but take any good 
landscape in our rooms, or any figure which con- 
tinues to hold us and interest us. Why do we 
care for it? Because it represents facts? It 



10 PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 

may show a hill and plain, a far-reaching road, a 
man or woman, a flock of sheep, — but that is 
not all. The vision of the painter, the thought 
he has, carries us beyond the facts and gives us 
a glimpse of a glory that is not on sea or land. 
It is the weakness of the so-called realistic 
school to fail to grasp this, and it is a practical 
art which gives us plain facts, and which degen- 
erates so often into banality and indecency. The 
obscuration of the ideal is here the ruin of the 
practical. 

What is literature without this ideal element ? 
In the historic development of literature crea- 
tive epochs yield to the critical, but even then 
vision may be kept. Very often, however, the 
critical ages are followed by times in which real- 
ism dominates authorship, and literature becomes 
the mere portrayal of certain lines of fact, or a 
wearisome playing on the same chords of sensi- 
bility. It is supposed to come nearer to real 
life. So we get, at length, a fiction which finds 
its material in the baser and worse elements of 
life, "worldly, sensual, devilish," — abnormal, 
pathological, exaggerating certain weaknesses 
and passions of men till they are made to seem 
all life, — unsettling the real values and inviting 
susceptible minds to sights and discussions fitter, 



PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 11 

often, for the dissecting room of a hospital than 
for the pabulum of a fresh clean soul. This is 
not the literature which lasts : it debases, drags 
down, contaminates, defiles, — but it is too 
" real," too " practical " to last. The world's 
books are those which appeal to the ideals of 
men and which glorify the common with the 
magic touch of the unseen. 

The illustration is equally clear in science, 
whose mission is so commonly thought to be with 
mere facts. When Romanes, in his early life, 
reasoned himself into agnosticism, he found the 
world another thing, he tells us, loveless, because 
Godless. As Jean Paul put it long before, God 
had become a force, aether a gas, the world a 
world machine, the second life a coffin. The 
true glory of science is not to gather facts, though 
many of its disciples would turn it into a Grad- 
grind, — as if this universe were a mere rec- 
tangle. It is the high mission of science to 
interpret fact, to reveal thought, to show the rela- 
tions which give us a cosmos instead of a chaos. 
The positivism of Comte, with its contempt for 
theology and metaphysics, was as false to science 
as to philosophy, because it failed to grasp the 
truth that there can be no science where there 
is not the transcending of the actual in theory, 



12 PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 

outlook, and aim. It is just here that mysticism 
will always have power over men, because it 
expresses the soul's feeling that there must be 
deeper mysteries than eye can see, ear can hear, 
or human plummet sound. It makes us akin to 
poet and prophet, and gives us communion with 
those who have been the real seers, — se-ers, — 
of the race. 

How different is the teacher's work, too, if 
viewed from the " practical " aspect, as distin- 
guished from that ideal view of his work and 
duty which includes the really practical. There 
are always too many teachers whose view of 
their responsibility is limited to an effort to cram 
so much knowledge into the head of a given 
pupil. No wonder that it seems to so many a 
dull profession ! The pupil is often dull, the 
lesson dull, the effort to do the same task over 
and over exceeding dull, if there be no vision 
beyond class room and text-book, and that single 
day in the life of a boy. Probably there is no 
explanation that accounts for the very large 
amount of poor teaching in our schools and 
colleges so fruitful as the lack of vision on the 
part of the teachers. No true teacher's sight 
is bounded by class room and lesson and pupil. 
That class room is a source of influence for life, 



PRACTICAL OK IDEAL? IB 

that lesson is one step in the building of mind 
and character, that pupil is to grow and carry 
the influence of that hour into the world's great 
life. No one with a soul looks at The Angelus 
and sees there only peasants at eventide. It is 
not admired and sung for that. So schoolroom 
and pupil and teacher, regarded as simple facts, 
estimated in what we call a "plain, practical 
way," are not objects to awaken enthusiasm, but 
to the soul that sees, there is nothing beside the 
home and church that means so much to all life 
as that room and teacher and boy or girl. 

Englishmen often used to say of Thomas 
Arnold, that great teacher of teachers as well 
as of boys, that it was a shame to waste such a 
man, scholar, theologian, statesman, in teaching 
Latin syntax to boys. Nothing, in itself, could 
seem duller, more useless, less practical, and 
if a boy is just a boy, and Latin syntax is an end, 
Arnold's critics were quite right. But Thomas 
Arnold knew that syntax was an instrument, 
that a class room was a throne of influence and 
inspiration, that his boys were to touch the life 
of an Empire, and nothing he could have 
done in Church or State would have ministered 
to his generation as did his teaching in that plain 
class room in Rugby. 



14 PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 

Another illustration is found in our common 
talk of " practical politics." That means politi- 
cal work and planning that will secure imme- 
diate results for those who are working, — the 
management of men and means so that party 
success shall be assured, or some particular 
scheme realized. It is distinguished from ideal 
politics which are supposed to deal with men as 
they are not and with conditions which never 
exist. Naturally the latter means failure, but 
does the former mean success ? Is it a mistake 
that " practical politics " means in common par- 
lance a politics divorced from righteousness, 
unhampered by strict moral law, and adapted 
only to selfish ambitions and partisan ends? 

This popular judgment is well founded because 
based on results as well as on long-continued 
observation of tendencies. This mistake in 
ideal politics, so called, is in holding in view only 
conditions and means which do not exist ; the 
mistake in practical politics, so called, is in the 
thought only of those which do exist. The 
truly practical here, as in education, science, 
art, is that which sees the ideal through the prac- 
tical, and knows that the unseen is the eternal 
element here as elsewhere. The average politi- 
cal boss is the man, for example, who can 



PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 15 

manipulate men, and who uses offices, or other 
bribes, as means of holding them to his purposes, 
and whose view is confined to party ends, 
unembarrassed by any care for such ideal con- 
ceptions as the nation, or the whole body of the 
people. He may chance to be an able man in 
some specific line of statesmanship, though that 
has not generally been true of such leaders 
among us, as was Walpole, for example, in 
England, — but he seems pitifully small and 
insignificant when contrasted with the real 
leader of men, the statesman with ideals who 
can lift men to their level, and who can inspire 
a people's courage and hope and effort, like 
Chatham or the younger Pitt. The " practical 
politician" among us is the man who takes 
things as they are and keeps them as they 
are, and our hope must always be in those 
who can see beyond party success or the carry- 
ing of an election, and who believe in striving 
to realize the things which are out of sight. 
Judging by centuries instead of years the 
practical, here as elsewhere, is one with the 
ideal. 

But why need we go beyond our common 
every-day life for our illustration? The thor- 
oughly " practical " mind tends to see in life a 



16 PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 

routine of common toil, and viewed externally 
it is uninspiring enough. 

" The homely nurse doth all she can 
To make her foster child, her inmate man, 
Forget the glories he hath known." 

The philosophy of " the man with a hoe " might 
have a far larger application in this aspect. 
The weeding of a garden, the ploughing of a field, 
the sweeping of a room, the cooking of a dinner, 
the sewing of a garment, the selling of goods, 
are in themselves dreary enough if one cannot 
see beyond them, and it is just this power of 
vision, this infusion of the ideal, which exalts 
so many " common " lives and makes their 
sphere of toil holier than most temples. I have 
the vision of a man, now, ill among ordinary 
surroundings, without a touch of poetry in his 
circumstances, making his sick-room a place of 
sacred pilgrimage because the spirit in him was 
so sweet and pure, and clothed all his common 
conditions of life with a reflection of the glory 
of the world he saw by faith. That is just the 
power the ideal has to transmute the real, and it 
is this which makes philosophy, which gives 
God, freedom, immortality, more practical than 
baking bread. The thought that can make " the 
meanest work divine," the vision that can relate 



PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 17 

every little duty to the great plan of God, the 
faith that can catch what the centuries are say- 
ing amid the wild chorus of the hours (to adopt 
a word of Emerson) is worthier of esteem and 
cultivation than any skill of hand or eye, and 
indeed gives to all deftness and all labor point 
and charm and prospect. 

A final illustration may be drawn from reli- 
gion. This is, indeed, the very sphere of the 
ideal, and yet religious life, so called, is often 
visionless and consists in a close-bound round of 
dogma, tradition, ritual, habitual service, dead 
and formal. That is the sure end of it all if 
religious services be made ends in themselves 
and the pragmatic spirit be suffered to control 
the life. But how different if the Life be all in 
all and our lives the expressions of His own, — 
so that in joy we know a higher pleasure, and in 
sorrow feel the law of life which back of all is 
love, and know the hand which guides even in 
the valley of the shadow, whose being is an 
ocean to our little sea, an ocean of which we 
shall know more and ever more. 

Then our dogmas are but our efforts to con- 
ceive of Him; our prayers — they are but the 
climbing of our spirits toward Him ; our good 
deeds — they are but the weak efforts of our 



18 PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 

love to answer Him ; this veil of sense, beyond 
which we sometimes gain glimpses, this is but 
the shadow of Himself, and we shall see Him as 
He is, and be like Him. What a different thing 
is "life, death, and the vast forever," if it be 
thus but the half revelation and half concealing 
of a Father and a Friend ! It is in the power of 
this vision, not because of rite and ceremony and 
religious facts, that men have endured, as seeing 
Him who is invisible. 

Near the Hot Springs of North Carolina there 
is a section called " the Shut-in Country." As 
one rides his horse up the mountain roads, and 
pushes through the beautiful streams, he passes 
here and there a single -room cabin. In the dis- 
tance he may have seen a woman in the door, 
but she has turned her back and walked away. 
The eager curiosity of a New England home is 
wanting, and the people have turned in upon 
themselves in thought and speech. They tell 
you in the mission schools that the first task is 
to awaken interest in something beyond them- 
selves and their immediate neighbors, to stimu- 
late curiosity, to lift them beyond their " real " 
and " practical." Vision, aspiration, is the first 
essential. So do many who are more favored 
lose the best of life, because they see only facts 



PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 19 

and do not see through them to their relations 
and meaning. They are dwellers in a shut-in 
country. The mountains are but mountains to 
them, and yet they might tell of the Everlast- 
ing ; the stones might preach their sermons, but 
they are only stones ; they might read the books 
of the running brooks, but the brooks are just 
running streams for them ; the practical is not 
transfigured by the ideal, and the beauty and 
power and peace of life are largely lost for the 
want of vision. 

Why is this so ? Why is the real thing, the 
single fact, the separate life, unreal, untrue, in- 
sufficient ? Why must the practical be moved 
by the ideal or lose its practical character alto- 
gether ? 

Because the ideal universalizes the real. That 
is only saying, in somewhat philosophical phrase, 
that the individual fact or thing is made signifi- 
cant and is brought into the relations that give 
it worth only by that which relates it to other 
facts and things, and makes it part of the great 
whole. Nothing is complete in itself. What 
would the life of any individual mean if it were 
absolutely the only life? It is significant be- 
cause of many lives and common interests and 
relations that reach on and on and have no lim- 



20 PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 

its, — as the wavelets keep circling out when a 
stone is thrown into the lake, ^e cannot think 
that what we see is all that is seen, and that 
what engrosses us is all life. Insight, vision, 
the ideal, is the suggestion of the relation of 
our interests and of what we see to the whole of 
life and thought and sight and purpose. With- 
out it there could be nothing greater than the 
individual and his interests, no cosmos, no uni- 
verse, no " all in all." 

Suppose we try to forget that and lose sight 
of it for a moment. Our act is now just our 
own, our thought our thought, with no rela- 
tion to any other interest or any other's act or 
thought. Then what meaning is left to our ac- 
tion or thinking, or even to ourselves, if there is 
no other individual, and no wider universe than 
that act of ours? If we could think of an un- 
related atom, and we cannot, just because this is 
a universe, what could it mean ? It is impossi- 
ble, indeed, for us to rest a moment in the con- 
viction that our acts can be unrelated and our 
thoughts unbound to a something more perma- 
nent than they. Indeed, that would be to think 
chaos, and our minds are so constituted that 
they cannot imagine or accept a world which 
has not in it an informing principle of law 



PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 21 

and order, — cosmic, not chaotic. One law, 
one order, relates all details, binds into unity 
atoms, individuals, worlds, — and gives us a uni- 
verse, permanent, abiding, in which the many 
single thoughts, acts, purposes, lives, events, 
gain their significance. The ideal shows us 
that, takes our single thought or purpose, and 
binds it to the soul of things, and we know that 
what is true for us singly is true for the whole, 
even to its remotest bounds, and what is really 
beautiful and abidingly good is beautiful every- 
where and good to the end of time. 

When the light from the sun or from some 
distant star flashes into the spectrum the mes- 
sage that sodium is one of its constituents, we 
know that sodium here and sodium in Arcturus 
are identical. When we talk of righteousness, 
truth, faith, love, we cannot think a universe in 
which they shall mean one thing here and an- 
other there ; the same light in the spiritual spec- 
trum flashes here and beyond the stars. 

The vision of the soul, the ideal, is our vehi- 
cle of this great truth, relating the individual 
event and life to the sum of things, carrying us 
beyond the transient to the permanent, beneath 
the surface to the soul of things. 



22 PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 

" That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
And decomposes but to recompose, 
Becomes my universe that feels and knows." 

That is the truth we have been illustrating 
throughout this essay, — in literature, in art, in 
music, in science, in education, in all life, — 
that vision relates the little to the great, and 
the transient to the eternal. Our single effort 
is part of a whole ; that dignifies it; our common 
duties have eternal meaning and worth. There 
is no death where there is such a vision. That 
the ideal does for life. But not to see that, to 
know only the unrelated selfish deed or thought, 
may be in common phrase to "see things as 
they are," but it is death. In fact, it is not 
to see things as they are, for in God's universe 
there is no truth and no good and no real sight 
where the soul is not moved by this deeper 
vision of the ideal. 

But why? again. There must be some fuller 
answer to our question. Why does this vision 
bring the scattered elements of our lives into 
eternal relationships ; why, in the phrase already 
used, does the ideal universalize the real? Be- 
cause the ideal embodies the real, — because it is 
the everlasting real. We must illustrate this 
from a very familiar fact, — and therein see 



PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 23 

how true it is. Home ! What is it ? House, 
furniture, certain accustomed haunts, a few well- 
known lives, — does that describe it ? What has 
analysis to do with it? It is a theme for the 
poet's insight, or for the noble outpourings of 
the organ. It is not the sum of things seen that 
make a home, but the unseen which makes it 
sacred, whatever the changes of outward condi- 
tions, and howsoever many of its tangible ad- 
juncts be taken away. It is here the invisible, 
the ideal, that is the real. When we try in 
practical fashion to describe the whole as equal 
to the sum of its parts, we must not leave out 
this subtile and imponderable part. It is not 
really " practical " to forget to include the one 
element which gives permanency and universal 
significance. 

So the State is not merely the sum of some 
seventy millions of integers, not merely one life 
with all its varied interests and strivings and 
affections and aims multiplied by some given 
denominator. It is more than the union of men 
for a government, more than a social contract, 
as Hobbes or Rousseau would have it, with 
superficial sight of it, more than ruler and cab- 
inet and legislature. It is ideal, and yet most 
real, — more than all these because it gathers 



24 PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 

them all up into a higher synthesis whose ex- 
pression these are, but whose reality and essence 
are not here but in the unseen realm of ideas. 

Is the Church the sum of its great history and 
its present life, — men and women all over the 
world striving to live a life whose pattern has 
been set forth in a particular book ? Is it not 
rather the ideal, — the spiritual and unseen type 
descending out of heaven from our God, toward 
which in various degrees the churches approach, 
— themselves most really churches as they real- 
ize this ideal, and not as they prosper in num- 
bers and wealth and in magnificence of the 
housing of the spiritual idea? 

Or, more simply, would we say that a statue is 
so many pounds of marble plus so many days' 
work? Many statues might be justly so de- 
scribed, but those which have elevated the 
imaginations and ideals of generations have 
done so only because of an ideal embodied in 
them, because a thought from the unseen world 
has tenanted the marble or the bronze and lives, 
even where the marble is broken and the perfec- 
tion of the work destroyed. In all these it is 
the ideal which is the real, and where vision 
ceases they perish precisely because the real is 
lost and the meaning of them is gone. 



PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 25 

Think, for example, what the flag really is, 
— a few strips of varicolored bunting, a mere 
fancy of the seamstress's art, so many yards of 
red and white and blue arranged according to 
the decision of some legislative committee. Is 
that true? That is what we see. But when 
men see it in a foreign port, — or when its glory 
waves above the field of battle, — or when it 
proudly floats from the dome of the capital ? If 
that is all, it is nothing. When the flag is really 
a flag it means home and loved ones, Lares and 
Penates, a type of government, a world's hope. 
Men do not die for a rag, but for this, in what 
it embodies, for the everlasting real which is 
here but the ideal, they give all they have with 
regret that they have but one life to give for 
their country. 

So I have tried to answer the question with 
which we started, — Can we really divorce the 
practical and ideal? By illustrations drawn 
from science, the arts, education, common life, 
we have seen that the element which gives abid- 
ing value to all of these is the ideal, and that 
there is no permanence of interest where that is 
wanting. We have found, indeed, that it is 
"the unseen things" which "are eternal." and 
that what we most treasure in all that we call 



26 PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 

most real is this factor which only the spirit in 
us perceives, and which cannot be measured nor 
weighed nor handled. It is this which binds us 
into the larger universe than our individual lives 
could know, and makes possible the cosmos, the 
universe, as over against our isolated lives. 
When it was said, thousands of years ago, 
" Where there is no vision the people perish," 
the writer caught the very deepest truth for the 
individual as well as for the national life, and 
stated what history and biography have always 
illustrated, that the life of nations and of men 
counts for little or nothing when the vision of 
the unseen is lost and the pursuit of the ideal is 
forsaken. 

In all Roman history, for example, there is 
nothing so practical in that eminently practical 
people as the national ideal, — that outreaching 
for unity and compactness, the very genius of 
imperial rule, — which patiently gathered the 
scattered powers of Italy to itself through five 
hundred years, and then in a single century con- 
quered the world. So long as there was an ideal 
there was growth, force, expansion ; but in 
games, and pastimes, and banquets, and debauch- 
eries, and vast wealth, used only to please and 
amuse, there was no vision. The end came 



PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 27 

when the people were content with the actual, 
and when "practical" meant the meeting of the 
issues of each day as it appeared, and when 
there came against it the force of a new civili- 
zation with outlook and ideal. 

That is but a parable of what has always been 
true in states and churches and individual 
lives. The so-called " practical " has meant 
defeat, failure, the sapping of the best of life, 
and the ideal has been the inspiration and the 
saviour of the real and itself the truly practical. 

" Practical politics," then, must really mean 
political planning and administration that keep 
in view the great ends of the people's good 
and the nation's growth, and that have under- 
standing of the conditions which preserve and 
exalt a people. The so-called "practical poli- 
tics " which connote the mere service of a party, 
and the attainment of partisan success and 
spoils, and the satisfactions of a " boss," carry 
in themselves ruin for both party and country, 
and are practical only in the sense in which the 
near-sighted man sees a landscape. 

Practical education is that which trains and 
broadens and enriches life, so that in the long 
stretch of the years it not only meets its respon- 
sibilities but understands the wise use of the 



28 PRACTICAL OR IDEAL? 

multiform resources of life, and it contrasts 
with the education which calls itself practical 
because it narrows life to some single aim or fits 
it to do some one thing. The life is more than 
meat. 

The practical man is the one who while caring 
for present needs and meeting the duties of each 
day scrupulously, sees past them to the higher 
ends they subserve, and lives in the daily vision 
of higher possibilities, of greater attainments, 
of larger life, — the vision casting its glory 
backward over the common things until even 
the lowly duties catch a glimpse of it, as often a 
very unattractive landscape has a touch of 
heaven given it as the rising sun tints it and 
glorifies its plainness. 



J^y-30 teOX 



JUL 11 1901 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Sept. 2004 

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